Stripped Down for Parts: Imperial Tide: The Great War, 1914-1918

 

 

Charles S, Roberts Award nominee: Best World War I Game, 2022

 

Gregory M. Smith is a firm candidate for the hardest working man in Wargames (though Herman Luttman and David Thompson may be giving him a run for his money). One of the originators of the narrative generation-style games, his The Hunters (ComSim Press, 2013) and its sibling games, Smith (according to BoardGameGeek) has no less than sixteen games in print (all in the last ten years) with another three listed on BGG at impending (Rebel Tide: the American Civil War (Compass Games, ~2024 – this has been flagged to release in the first half of this year), the next of the Tide games, British Tank Ace (Compass Games, ~2024 – Bill Thomas, owner of Compass, has flagged this one for a probably third of fourth quarter release this year), a successor to the wildly successful American Tank Ace (Compass 2022), and Spitfire Ace: Air Defense over Britain, 1940 (Compass, ~2025)). On top of this, Smith is a regular at some of the notable game conventions in the States, and always brings with him a half-dozen more prototypes of games he has in the works.

The upcoming Rebel Tide is the third in Smith’s “Tide” series of games. It follows on from Pacific Tide (Compass Games, 2019 – which I have looked at previously here) and Imperial Tide: The Great War, 1914-1918 (Compass Games, 2022), which is our subject for today.

Imperial Tide is a two-player (solitaire friendly) game that covers the entirety of the First World War in Europe and the Near East. It’s a big call for a game that should play out in three to four hours. If you’re looking for

The Tide series card-purchase mechanic first appeared in Mitchell Ledford and Smith’s Ostkrieg: WWII Eastern Front (Compass Games, 2020), which, due to the vagaries of the production processes involved, actually came out the year following the release of Pacific Tide. While receiving a co-design credit for the game, Smith has always been up-front about the card-purchase mechanism shared by all the games was Ledford’s brainchild. But Smith saw its potential, how it could be applied to other conflict situations.

For me, the box art is possibly the weakest part of the whole package. I don’t have a problem with the art itself. It’s a fine piece of work by any standard; the clutch of soldiers (in BEF garb) boldly facing the carnage to come is reminiscent of propaganda posters from the period. To me, it just doesn’t convey the scope of the game, which covers an entire continent. I want to be clear that it’s just me thinks this; nearly everyone I’ve shown to has commented on the great or evocative the cover art.

The box back features some map detail (Western Front, of course), some sample counters sand some sample cards; one Year Card (I’ll come back to this later) and two Game Cards (including the Schlieffen Plan card that gets every game rolling, in the same way the Pearl Harbor card is always the first played in Pacific Tide.

The box-back informs us that Imperial Tide is a two-player game, that you'll need to set aside three to four hours to play it to completion, and that the recommended age for players is 14+, which sounds about right to me. The solitaire suitability is rated as high; I haven't yet played Imperial Tide, but on the strength of having played Pacific Tide solo a couple of times now, I would vouch for this. 

Sample pages.

The rulebook is functional and reasonably clearly presented. It probably helps to already be familiar with Pacific Tide (in my case) or Ostkrieg, but I don’t imagine the rules or concepts that drive Imperial Tide offering any kind of challenge to learning for an experienced wargamer. The rulebook is not without its problems (I’ll come back to this later), but they are eminently readable and good use is made of illustrations to demonstrate how the rules work dynamically.

The board is mounted, the requisition 22” by 34” in size, and presents a point-to-point map of Europe from the southern England to Turkey, Denmark to Spain. It also incorporates two Combat Result Tables (one facing each side of the board – no neck cramps trying to twist around to see it), and the two sides’ Resource Point tracks, as well as a "terrain" key. The map board is a nice piece of work, adorned with period propaganda posters representative of the belligerent states, and incorporating a space for the Year Card currently in play. Tim Allen was the artist responsible for the project, and the map, cards and counters all maintain a consistent look and feel.

The counters and game markers are of the easy-punch variety, .75” and pre-rounded. They look and feel nice to use, with a matt finish. Troop markers are denoted by a figure of a soldier and the flag of the represented nation. Artillery counters represent stockpiles of ordinance prepared in advance for pushes, rather than the artillery pieces themselves that were ubiquitous along the fronts in the war.

Other counters include the markers to designate a change in control of a location to the other side used to keep track of each country’s resource points. Resource points are the currency each nation uses to wage war, and they are a scarce commodity. These are kept track of on the board, clearly in the view of both players.

The troop counters exhibit a single value. This is the represented strength. The units are numbered, 1, 2, 3, etc. and can be swapped out or made “change” (i.e., a 5-value counter swapped out for a 3 and two 1s, or vice versa) as convenient). There are no less than thirteen nationalities of troops represented, the background colours of which correspond to the colours of locations on the map-board. Troops can be mobile of entrenched. When entrenched the counter is flipped to exhibit a marker declaring the troops current state. When they move, they will, of course, loose this status. There are no naval or arial forces in featured in the game; these are abstracted into events made available through the play of cards.

Like its series predecessors, Imperial Tide uses Year cards to guide the play experience along roughly historical lines (but not to the point of railroading the game’s narrative; there’s still plenty or rom for ahistorical deviation). The thing that the Great War, the war in the Pacific, and the Nazi Eastern Front (and to some degree, the American Civil War, for that matter) have in common is the aggressors’ initial forays being compelling and forceful but reaching a turning point (the ebbing tide) from where victory becomes ever less feasible. The use of Year Cards to set new parameters for each round in the game helps approximate this shift in game terms.

This next part hurts a little to talk about, but it needs to be addressed. The game comes with a double-sided errata sheet. To be fair, most of these items on the list are clarifications of various rules as stated in the published text, nine in all. Along with these clarifications, there are three additional rules, three corrections to the existing rules, a correction to two cards (cards 19 and 20 in the Allied deck are marked as available from 1916, but this should read 1917) and some typos on the cards and board.

My copy of the game, although it doesn’t seem to say so, is a second printing of Imperial Tide. It was released in early 2022 (the copyright date in the box is 2021) and sold out very quickly. I managed to nab a copy from the second run, which came into the warehouse I believe around the middle of last year.  None of the errata mentioned going to break the game, but I feel like the additional rules could have been incorporated into the rulebook without too much resetting, and perhaps the mistyped cards could have been redone before the second printing was run. I’ve worked as an editor on biggish documents, and I know how easy it is for multiple readers to miss something, but I thin with a second printing comes an opportunity to fix known problems. Having said that, changing things can have knock-on effects down the line where printing is concerned, so maybe it was a line-call whether to try to fix the known errata or to let it stand.

I ordered my copy of Imperial Tide direct from Compass Games. I received two copies of the errata sheet, so maybe Bill knew I’d be picky and wanted to get ahead of it.  

As I’ve come to expect from Compass Games, the package came with enough baggies to accommodate all the counters and markers for the game with some sensible sorting. What surprised me is that, in a first, the (good quality, 16mm) dice came not sealed in a little cellophane baggie that I’ll have to throw out later, but free range, unhindered and allowed to roam the box at will. I’ll wait to see if this is a trend from Compass or a one off, but if it becomes the norm, I won’t begrudge the lack of one more bit on non-recyclable plastic to deal with.

So, Imperial Tide; this was one of my most anticipated games of 2022, and I managed to get a copy before the end of 2023 (I bought this and issue No. 81 of Paper Wars, with Hermann Luttmann’s Position Magnifique: The Battle of Mars-la-Tour, 1870 (Compass Games, 2013) during Compass’s annual summer sale. I’m really looking forward to getting this to the table, and I hope to get a review out sooner rather than later (and another for Position Magnifique). As always, if you’re still reading this, thanks for staying with me this far.